This super successful tech CEO has a survival tip for working after a red-eye

CEO Brit Morin has a few super helpful productivity hacks for anyone trying to survive a hellish travel schedule including the dreaded red-eye.

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Though being a CEO of a successful tech startup sounds quite fun, there is a lot of blood, sweat, tears and travel that goes into it. Brit Morin, the CEO and founder of lifestyle media company Brit + Co, knows this first hand as she may fly to New York from her home in San Francisco as much as four times a month for appearances on TV, public speaking engagements as well as just meeting with clients. “Work travel is becoming more and more common because we live in this globalized business world where you can work from anywhere and still be a part of all kind of industries, but the power of a face to face meeting is still so much greater than that of an email,” she told Ladders after an event with Hilton Hotels & Resorts New Business Traveler Initiative.

Red-eye strategy

But she has a few super helpful productivity hacks for anyone trying to survive a hellish travel schedule. Morin actually suggests if you are flying from the West Coast to the East then you should opt for the red-eye, specifically the early red-eye flight. She calls it brutal but necessary. “With the early red-eye I land by 5 AM and then I can skip the traffic and get a few hours of sleep before my first meeting. If you add up [sleeping on the plane] and then in the hotel, it comes to 6 or 7 hours!” she told Ladders.

But what about for the way back? Morin, who usually takes very short trips to the East Coast as she has two young kids at home, says she purposefully lets herself get behind on emails “because I’m trying to maximize my time in that city and then I can use the plane ride home as an email catch up. That’s my approach.”

Millennials and travel

Though Morin mostly tries to do as much work and networking on her trips (though she confesses that getting to workout without a child interrupting her is a luxury she takes advantage of when she travels for work) she knows it is a bit different for young, professional Millennials. A 2018 survey commissioned by Hilton Hotels & Resorts found that travel and discovering new things is many Millennials favorite past time. Actually, 75% of young professionals in the U.S. see business travel as a major work perk and 65% consider it to be a status symbol. Nearly 40% of Millennials go so far as to say they wouldn’t take a job that didn’t allow them to travel for business and 56% create reasons to travel for business. So clearly sacrificing watching Stranger Things is not a big deal for this group.

“[Work trips] are important for Millennials because they like to travel. They like to explore new cities and even if it is a two-day trip they want to figure out the cool parts of town to stay in and the cool things to do while they are there,” she said. “Millennials would rather have experiences over a product.”